As you look around to find a decent budget web hosting provider, you can easily get confused. Commonly, the web hosts will assume that they are marketing their services to total dummies, who are easy to impress if you show them some large numbers to drool over. For instance, a budget web hosting provider may promise you things like: “Unlimited bandwidth”, with a cheap shared budget web hosting package costing less than $5 per month.
Such a great deal, right? OK, of course there is no such thing as “unlimited” resources on any web server. A budget web hosting provider is probably jamming 100:s of accounts on each web server, and then they claim that the customers all have “unlimited” bandwidth on that server - which is of course absurd.
So, if you happen to peruse a web hosting ranking site to compare web hosts, then don’t pay so much attention to features such as bandwidth; instead check what kind of customer reputation the host has.
Consider this: suppose even just a couple of the web sites on that jam-packed web server began to use really huge quantities of resources on that server - then it would simply crash. Actually, the limiting piece of hardware is likely going to be the CPU (central processing unit). If too many processing requests come in too fast, then the CPU will be overloaded and can no longer keep up. This happens especially with dynamic web sites, and these will load so slowly that no-one bothers to wait.
Of course, no web hosting provider will want this to happen, because all customers using this server are going to notice and be quite upset about it. Therefore, if the server begins to show signs of slowing down, then the host is surely going to take action. The web sites at fault will be disabled.
Then, different web hosting providers have various policies regarding further action. In some cases, the hosting account will be cancelled, in other cases the company will just issue some kind of warning to the customer in question.
Also, you can be certain that any web hosting company has some type of clause in their TOS (Terms Of Service) saying essentially that they have the right, at their discretion, to suspend any account which uses “too many server resources”. Yes, note that they can do this whenever they please…!
OK, by now you should understand how hypey that “unlimited bandwidth” advertising slogan really is. While you can probably use surprisingly large amounts of bandwidth if you happen to have a static web site - since such a site is not very resource-intensive - you will quickly run into problems if you are running a dynamic, PHP- or ASP-driven web site. Also databases are heavy users of CPU-resources, and cause your site to be in danger of suspension sooner.
My final advice, then, is not to be such a sucker that you get impressed by empty hype put out by web hosting providers. Instead, I suggest you visit reputable web hosting review sites to find out what authentic customers are saying!
Tags: Webmaster